WoW – More fun together!

Four Down

Our raid continues, Friday and Saturday nights. I think our roster is finally firming up. Ado’s shadow priest levelled from 60 to 85 and geared up in probably record time and was able to join us the first time this week; we had one of our paladins drop out two weeks ago so we’re not so melee heavy; I finally bit the bullet and brought in Kerick the paladin to heal. I wanted to have Repgrind on her mage but, we have a mage and a shadow priest and the one druid/two shaman heal team was…. not working out. Don’t get me wrong; both our shaman are great healers but we needed more single-target oomph.

That change happened partway through Friday night’s Magmaw attempts. Our team was a little different this week than last week and it took about 8 tries to get him down. Logarithm was solo tanking him for I believe the first time; Reversion initially tried boomkin-ing, but then swapped to his hunter. With two hunters, the worms didn’t have a chance. Once we got our kiting strategy down, Magmaw collapsed once again. And dropped a lovely leather agility bracer. That Reversion would have loved… if he hadn’t been on his hunter. Oh, and the spell dagger for the second week in a row, poor Karius would have loved that if I hadn’t made Rep switch to healing.

Then we went and worked on Omnitron. As a raid we hadn’t worked on it at all yet, although our melee shaman had healed attempts for the other guild raid, Ado of course has killed it many times with his main, and two of us had at least seen a couple wipes. Still it was essentially a totally new fight for us, and I was really proud how fast we picked up on things. Sure, a few times people ran the big beam of death through the raid, and we had one or two people get eaten by adds, and once I stood too close to a boss as he came up and got nommed before the tank could taunt it off – but the learning happened fast, and we got that kill decently before closing time. Another first for our raid, and our guild!

Saturday night we went to Bastion of Twilight right off. We had originally planned a three tank strategy but the third tank, not a regular, got called into work at the last minute so we went with a two tank plan instead. Reversion tanked the boss and got Hand of Protection to get stacks off; Logarithm did the adds. We brought up the whelps and single targeted them. Once a few were dead, Log released the Time Warden and tanked him as well. Raid burned down the whelps and other dragon and then we burned the boss.

Our first try went so beautifully. The whelps died, dragon died, we got on the boss, burned him down, down – I lost Rev, battled rezzed him, we kept going, then we lost Log but by then we had the adds down. 10%… 5%… and he enraged at 3%. We got him a tiny bit further and wiped at 2%.

Ouch. Went back in, found some of us had forgotten to flask, while others said they didn’t flask until after the first attempt, which… I disagree with vehemently, because of just this sort of thing. We would have one shot him if a couple people had had a bit more dps, or if we hadn’t let Log drop there. But it didn’t matter now. We picked ourselves up, buffed, flasked, and did the same thing, again perfectly, and this time Halfus died.

Finally. We’ve been working on him for weeks now. This was a hugely satisfying kill. I’d been sure that all we needed was a slightly more favorable drake configuration, and now we had it. We’d done so much work, come sometimes heartbreakingly close, with hard drakes, and now all the hard work paid off. We know this fight intimately, and I expect we’ll be able to manage harder drake combos as they come back up because we’ll start having more gear.

Since that took less than an hour, we had lots of time left, so as planned we went to Throne of Four Winds and killed the Council of Air again. Took a few tries; Log hadn’t been in on our successful attempt last week, we had a few people in different roles, and some bad luck with the ranged platform getting blown off a lot. Still, they died in the end, and with an hour left, we went BACK to Bastion and pressed on.

We killed trash toward the twin dragons. All night we hadn’t had an epic drop so it was time for one, and when I pointed out the sparklies on a kill that wasn’t mine to loot halfway through a trash pull, someone looked at it. “Agility leather”. I was surprised; I know the Bastion trash loot table, and there’s no agility leather there, but sure enough there it was, a purple hat – a world drop BOE epic! Cool!

Well, it went to Reversion of course. Nobody else in the raid could use it, he could, and it was his birthday so obviously that was meant for him! Someone did say something about how everyone should be allowed to roll on it for selling but I hope he was joking. Still, there’s a reason why we use master looter powers. We are trying to prevent loot drama, but if it’s going to happen, I intend to hold the ace cards.

So! Loving our raid. I’m so thrilled to be making real progress. Four kills, three of them guild firsts (and with four kills I think our guild is now somewhere around server 20th. Our server…. is weak.) People show up, do their jobs, and have fun. I can’t wait to do more progressing, see more fights. We need a little more work to get our current kills to real farm status, obviously, but once we do I’m excited to see how far we can get!

I wouldn’t mind trying you in that role either – is your healing spec disc or holy? My understanding is that a holy priest would fit well with a resto druid and shaman and certainly priest cooldowns are nice and powerful.

Cool, and I’m going to put you in my list of “people we can grab when we need more heals”. Talking with Rep she’s leaning toward sticking with the paladin though – it’s a good fit for the raid, uses that darn spellpower plate, and I think if you’re dpsing you’ll have more cycles for helping us with raid calling.

Besides it’s my goal to get you to race change to gnome because shadow gnomes walking toward the boss and dying are probably the most epic thing ever.

Going gnome… just seems wrong. I might do it for the lols as I can still keep an epic ‘stache and it pokes more fun at Elgar. It would be after getting all my rep peices though, that human bonus is pretty sweet.

I can’t tell you how happy I was when you asked if I wanted to come in for Halfus. I had several very strong reasons why I wanted in on that fight… That’s all I’m saying🙂. That, and thank you very much for letting me get that fight done. I confess to some initial anger when we got sooo very close and found out how many hadn’t used a flask or food. But I can understand why people do that on the first attempt. Not the way I do things, but I can understand it. All in all it was a great weekend of boss killing, with a little bit of new stuff to drive us forward. Thank you again!

Glad you were able to be there. It was a matter of strategies. I had planned to go with the safer three tank method but Cintas could not make it so you were in. Now I think the double bubbling actually worked better than three tanking would have. We appriciate your understanding when we do have to sub people out. Hopefully we can keep having the happy ‘problem’ of having more people interested than we can field.
I was pretty annoyed about the flask thing myself… but I could not really let anyone have an earful when I had flat forgotten my own flask😛 There were at least 4 people missing those so we would certainly have 1 shot him. Hopefully people can break that habit. When We are there a even 4 hours anyway so it is not like it saves any flasks.
We will not be flask-nazies on the the ‘first look’ pulls but we might have to start checking for the ‘on farm’ bosses.

Even for the very first pulls on a boss, flasking should be a given. Maybe it doesn’t increase your chance of killing the boss enough to seem helpful, but these first tries aren’t for killing – they are for looking and learning. And flasks improve the corpse running:fighting boss ratio. Especially for a non-hardcore raid like yours, where people can’t spend all day on raiding.
As for Halfus, did you have Time Warden + Storm Rider? I can’t think of another drake composition where two have to be released from the start, so that you need three tanks. And even this comp can be done with two tanks, it “just” means a heavy burden on your healers, regardless if you have two drakes on one tank or if you have to heal through instant fireballs.
That said, I should better look up the EU drake comp on mmo-champion for tomorrow…

We’ve had Time + Storm in the past which is why we had practiced a three tank strat; this week, with whelps + time, we two-tanked it.

I agree about the flasking and I’m going to have to keep an eye on that in the future. Hopefully now that flask costs have been lowered…. there are certain people who have actually *logged out* when we’ve had to take a break to save flask time. Again, I’ve got gold enough that I can managed 8 flasks a week, but hey, whatever…

I agree with you about the first tries being not for killing. I have run into some players that had a hard time understanding the concept. We have used different tactics on early pulls so we can get past certain phases and SEE later phases. Like blowing ‘hero’ early on Halfus when you know you are probably going to hit the enrage timer. Technically it is a bad idea, but when you are having issues getting past the first add due to the damage levels then it is a useful tactic for learning more about the fight. You have to be willing to do whatever it takes and put in the wipes so you can SEE all aspects of the fight. The tactics that let you learn the fight, and the tactics that let finally you down the boss might not be the same. For some casual raiders this can be a very strange concept. They are more willing to just try the tactics that are ‘suppose’ to work and if they don’t they blame it on low gear, or someone else’s play, and give up.

On Halfus we tended to tweak our tactics over and over to push how far we got in the fight. Then, when we hit the enrage, we started tweaking them back the other way until we found the ‘sweet spot’.

Same on Magmaw. We switched things up until we found a tactic that let us ‘brute force’ our way through a couple cycles. Then, with a better understanding of how it all worked we switched back to the ‘finesse’ tactics of proper kiting. Going into that fight cold, with low experience level raiders, the ‘finesse’ tactics (well timed minimalist kiting) were so chaotic and messy that we could not see what was going wrong. Using a less viable brute force tactic (lots of ranged standing in melee nuking adds as hard as they can) worked to let us see how it all worked. It gave us the breathing room to see the phases, learn the chaining, learn how to 1 tank it right, and all the other stuff. The chaos of a badly done ‘kite’ tactic did not let us learn much of anything.

We had one raider, not a regular, get EXTREMELY offended at the idea of using a ‘training tactic’ to see more of the fight. It surprised me because our regulars have no problem with the idea of tweaking things and trying stuff that is a little off the wall just so we can see more and learn more.

Thanks! I have not checked it yet. Hopefully we have a few weeks to get drops from him before we get another killer one. We have now seen 5 or his 10 combinations so I am not too worried about most of them.

Just looking over the patch notes, and it looks like even with a tougher combo, they’ve made some changes that might help us out.

Shadow Nova is now cast less frequently in 10-player modes to account for fewer available interrupts there.

The captured drakes in this encounter now apply Dragon’s Vengeance when they are killed instead of when they are freed. To account for this change, the health and damage of the drakes has been reduced, and the damage bonus gained from Dragon’s Vengeance has been increased.

To be honest, After more than a year of “Now that we’ve killed (x) boss once, he’s on farm”, and then people getting pissed off when it’s not easy the next time, I’m really enjoying the attitude on this team. I’ve always felt that until a group can kill a given boss everytime with a very low probability of wiping, said boss is not “on farm”. The desire to learn, tweak, and perfect here is so much more comfortable and fun than I’ve ever had to put up with before, let’s not change that please. Prior to getting him with your group, the best chance I had at the LK was with a very short-lived group whose leader said “One phase at a time”. With that attitude in place, we very quickly went farther than any other group in the guild.
A very simple change from who screwed that one up? Okay, let’s go again. to okay, what worked, what didn’t work, let’s make this change and try again, changes the whole raiding experience to something that’s just plain fun.
Yes, flasks are expensive, and hopefully will come down in price quickly… I’ve blown through more gold in the last month… But it’s worth it to me to explore a new raid (or several) in a fun environment where everyone seems to be more than willing to learn instead of pretending to be uber-leet super raiders.

That is a great run down of what is probably the biggest reason for the success of our raid so far.😀

So Grom, I am slowly coming up with some ideas for ‘tank boot camp’. When I helped Log get going on tanking it was kind of haphazard. What I am thinking would be interesting, fun, and hopefull effective is doing some exercise type runs focusing on specific components of tanking. Some things I could post about and would also be a more systematic way of approaching it. The ‘sink or swim’ approach sort of works but the more I think about it the more I realize that masks from the new tank some of the subtleties. Like that ‘martial arts’ versus ‘bar fight’ analogy the other day got me thinking and has made me egger to try out something different. The game itself, with how it gives you certain abilities at certain times, sorta already does a step by step training process for DPS and even healing to a degree but many people don’t change to tanking until top level.

Anyway, I am not ready with anything yet but I wanted to run that by you and see if that sounded interesting to you at all.

Being a martial artist, I too liked that analogy. And it makes the most sense. I can learn in a variety of ways, but by example is still the best for me. I have no problem with your idea here, and in fact I look forward to it. Same goes for Gromyste and healing. We can always try the occasional pull in a five man, or some trash pulls in raid as well, and we could give log a break on raid trash once in awhile and have me off tank. I’m up for any of those. I’m not a great tank, nor even very comfortable with tanking (mainly because of memory issues – I suffer from Advanced, Terminal CRS), but I’m always willing to try.